Thanksgiving weekend may kick off the holiday shopping season, but it also is the launch of the busy season for many college admissions officers.

With University of California and California State University applications due Saturday and deadlines looming at many private colleges in the weeks ahead, admissions officers are firing up their computers to begin reviewing the academic credentials of prospective students.

The process of sorting applications varies widely.

Some use review committees or multiple readers to pore through personal essays, recommendation letters and other information submitted. Others focus solely on test scores and GPAs to determine eligibility.

Regardless of the method used, the end result is the same: a decision about who will get a spot after weighing the hopes and dreams of high school seniors against their credentials.

Some universities will begin to notify students that they’ve been accepted before Christmas but most make those calls by early spring. Dealing with disappointed students is part of the process, as well.

“One thing you never want to lose track of is every one of those applications is a hopeful student,” said Sandra Cook, associate vice president for enrollment management at San Diego State University, which last year received 54,000 freshman applications and more than 20,000 transfer student applications.

The numbers are staggering, in part because automation has made it easier for students to apply to far more college than they did in the past.

The University of San Diego has used an online college-admission application known as the Common App since 2006 and applications that year jumped 27 percent. Since 2005, its applicant pool has more than doubled in size.

With its Dec. 15 deadline fast approaching, the private, Catholic university will augment its staff of 10 with eight to 10 outside readers to help it get through the crush of essays and documents submitted.

“We still believe in taking the traditional method. We prioritize our time and we read every document,” said Minh-Ha Hoang, director of admissions at USD. “We assess the transcript test scores. We read each recommendation. We read the essay and we also review the extracurricular activities.”

With each counselor reading 1,000 to 1,400 applications before decisions are made in mid-February, everyone is working “eight days” a week, Hoang joked.

Point Loma Nazarene University, a private Christian university, uses a two-tiered process to select its incoming students. Admissions counselors make initial recommendations based on what they know about the student and their file and then an admissions committee reviews it, said Shannon Hutchison, associate director of undergraduate admissions.

“We see Point Loma as a place where students get really individualized attention. We want that to start at the beginning of the admission process,” Hutchison said.

Students can request a personal interview with their counselor and have the option of providing a personal submission, often a DVD or collage of their work. One counselor received a pizza “with Point Loma spelled out in pepperoni” from a creative applicant, Hutchison said. She couldn’t recall if the student was admitted.

The university received about 3,400 applications last year and admitted about 1,800. The freshman class ended up around 650 students. It has an early application deadline of Nov. 15 with a final deadline of Feb. 15.

Hutchison said Point Loma Nazarene staff members do look at social media, particularly when the student mentions the university in their Twitter or Facebook posts. She recalled how a student athlete once bragged on Twitter about signing with Point Loma and another school at the same time.

If she sees something that would affect an application, Hutchison said she’ll pass it along to the admission committee. “Generally we look at it and roll our eyes,” she said.

In contrast, UC San Diego , SDSU and USD don’t look at students’ social media activities as part of the admissions process.

“For practical purposes, who really has the time to go and look at Facebook and Instagram and be researching students that way?” said USD’s Hoang. “And we give students the benefit of the doubt. We trust what is in there. We are counselors, not investigators.”

UC San Diego prepares for its admissions process by recruiting and training a team of experts, mainly high school principals and school counselors, to work as external readers to help wade through the tens of thousands of applications it receives, said Mae Brown, assistant vice chancellor of admissions.

Last year, the university received more than 67,000 freshman applications and 15,000 transfer applications — and officials are bracing for an increase this year.

This year the university hired 130 external readers to complement its 22 staff members in reviewing files. Each reading takes between five to 10 minutes and the reader then assigns the applicant a score. Each file is read by two people.

Readers review the applications “holistically” — meaning they take into account not only test scores and grades but low socioeconomic status, the quality of their high school and whether a student would be the first in their family to attend college, Brown said.

Because the university is so selective, students are encouraged to “apply broadly” to many universities and typically UCSD applicants are interested in three or four UC schools.

“It doesn’t matter to us whether they’ve applied to 3 UCs or all nine. We are looking at the file based upon what we see in that file,” Brown said.

The university last year admitted about 37 percent of its applicant pool. Admissions officers sometimes hear back from those who have been rejected.

“We were not able to admit a lot of wonderfully prepared students,” Brown said. “Once we have made final decisions, we staff the phones for two weeks to talk about the decisions and strategies they can consider to use to consider UC San Diego at a later date or to talk to them about other options. We know that the disappointment is there.”

Admissions staff at SDSU also inform students who fail to get in that they can reapply later as transfer students from community college.

“There is access — it just may not be the exact same way as you want it,” Cook said. “This can be a blow to folks, that they will have to come up with an alternative plan, but we try to help them with that.”

Cook said SDSU also has a “pretty robust” appeals process and occasionally will reverse decisions. She recalls one case where triplets applied but only two of the siblings got in.

“Mom and Dad had bought a condo and they wanted them to be here all together for financial reasons,” she said.